Bea Arthur

(1926 - 2009)

“Let’s
face it,” actress Bea Arthur told an
interviewer in 1985, “nobody ever asked
me to play Juliet.” At five feet, nine
and a half inches, with a deep voice and
commanding presence, Arthur has instead made
her career playing “strong women” who
speak their own minds and control everyone
around them. Although these women have included
such formidable characters as Yente in Fiddler
on the Roof and Vera Charles in Mame,
Arthur will probably always be best known
for portraying liberal Maude Findlay, the “women’s
libber” who stuck it to Archie Bunker
on television’s All in the Family and
then dominated her own situation comedy,
Maude, throughout the 1970s. Arthur’s
imperious and controversial Maude left a
lasting imprint on American television and
feminism.

Born Bernice Frankel in New York City on May 13, 1926, Arthur was
the middle child of Phillip and Rebecca Frankel’s
three daughters. When Arthur was eleven,
her father’s financial troubles led
him to move the family to Cambridge, Maryland,
to run a clothing store. As one of the only
Jews in a segregated southern city, as well
as the tallest girl in all her school classes,
Arthur faced anti-Semitic rejection, considered
herself a “misfit,” and grew
up “painfully shy.” She spent
much of her time reading movie magazines
and dreaming of becoming “a little,
short, blonde movie star.” To hide
her insecurities, Arthur developed a mean
Mae West impression and won the title of “wittiest
girl” in her class at Cambridge High
School. After two additional years at private
Linden Hall High School, Arthur studied at
Blackstone College, a junior college in Virginia,
and then graduated from the Franklin Institute
of Science and Arts.

After working for a year
as a medical laboratory technician in Cambridge,
Arthur left for New York “to become
someone else.” She entered the New
School’s famous Dramatic Workshop to
study with Erwin Piscator, along with classmates
Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger,
and Tony Curtis. Although Piscator admired
her height and deep voice and cast her in
the leading role in classic plays like Taming
of the Shrew and Lysistrata, Arthur
was unable to find professional work in classical
theater and instead began her career singing
in nightclubs and reading bit parts on Sid
Caesar’s Show of Shows. Despite
a number of years without professional success,
Arthur was personally happy. She married
a fellow Piscator student, actor, and director
Gene Saks, on May 28, 1950, and the two entered
domestic bliss making audition rounds together.

Bea Arthur’s career
took off when she landed the role of Lucy
Brown in the long-running off-Broadway hit The
Threepenny Opera in 1954. Receiving excellent
reviews, Arthur was soon in demand as a character
actress. Critics praised her for her “skillfully
devastating” satire and claimed that
she “ooze[d] comic command” in
her various roles on and off Broadway. In
1964, she created the role of Yente the Matchmaker
in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway,
and in 1966, she won the Tony Award for best
supporting actress for her portrayal of the
acid-tongued Vera Charles in Mame,
directed by her husband.

Despite her successes on
Broadway, however, Arthur won her genuine
celebrity status when Norman Lear, the creator
of All in the Family and a longtime
admirer of Arthur, persuaded her to do a
guest spot on the show in 1971. Appearing
as Maude, Edith’s limousine-liberal
cousin, Arthur skewered Carroll O’Connor’s
Archie and won the immediate attention of
CBS executives. Lear worked with Arthur to
create a spin-off series, Maude, which
premiered in 1972 and quickly moved into
the top ten in the Nielsen ratings, winning
Arthur an Emmy in 1977. In its six seasons,
the show explored a host of controversial
topics, including alcoholism and psychoanalysis,
but it was Maude’s decision to have
an abortion that broke television taboos,
sparked loud protest, and propelled the show’s
popularity in the liberal political environment
of the early 1970s. As Maude, Bea Arthur
inspired many female viewers as she came
to symbolize the growing women’s movement,
portraying a woman who “looked real.
. . [who] said what she felt and could tell
her husband to go to hell.”

Maude’s outspoken
liberalism and controlling nature marked
her as a stereotypical Jewish mother in the
minds of some critics. Arthur and Saks insisted
in 1972, however, that the show’s creators
had intentionally made Maude a WASP matron
because, “if you made her Jewish. .
. her courage in fighting bigotry would be
personal instead of ideological.” Although
this assertion reflects television writers’ (and
perhaps Arthur’s) uneasiness with Jewish
identity, it also yields a grain of truth.
Had Maude been labeled “a Jewish mother,” her
courage and fiery independence probably would
have been caricatured as insignificant nagging.
The decision to make Maude a WASP allowed
her to be a “prototypical woman” and
thus an icon of the women’s movement.

In real life, Bea Arthur’s
attitude toward feminism was much more ambivalent
than that of her alter ego. In the early
1970s, Arthur insisted that she did not understand
the women’s movement: “I’ve
never felt that being a wife and mother isn’t
enough.” Interviews portrayed her as
a gentle, unpretentious woman deeply tied
to her husband and two adopted sons, and
nothing like the threatening Maude. By 1978,
however, the series had produced tensions
that shattered Arthur’s longtime marriage
to Gene Saks, and in later interviews, Arthur
actually adopted the language of the women’s
movement: “I don’t think I ever
truly believed in marriage anyway,” she
told an interviewer in 1985. “I guess
marriage means that you’re a woman
and not a . . . person.”

Befitting her new status
as a single, older woman, Bea Arthur created
a new television character in the 1980s:
Dorothy Zbornak, the divorced schoolteacher
of The Golden Girls. From 1985 to 1992, Arthur
played Dorothy as the sharp-tongued leader
of four older women who lived together in
Florida, coping with aging while looking
for love and enjoying female friendship.
This realistic, funny portrayal of senior
citizens won the series a loyal older audience
and helped Arthur gamer a second Emmy in
1988.

Despite her continued identification
with the theater in the 1990s, it is clearly
television audiences that have most warmly
embraced Bea Arthur’s “strong
women,” and it is through television
that Arthur has most influenced American
culture. On Maude, Arthur helped break
down television barriers and normalize topics
like abortion and alcoholism as subjects
for open discussion. Perhaps even more important,
selves. The sharp-tongued heroine who does
not conform to cultural standards of youthful
beauty or wifely duty but who holds herself
tall and speaks her mind has been a rarity
in American popular culture. Bea Arthur embodied
this rarity and created a role model for
many American women.

Arthur died at her home in the Greater Los Angeles Area in the early morning hours of Saturday, April 25, 2009. She had been ill from cancer.